When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Paul Kalanithi was thirty six and finishing up a decades worth of training to become a neurosurgeon when he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. In When Breath Becomes Air, he writes movingly about how to make sense of a life so suddenly interrupted and what makes life worth living even as it fades away. A beautiful book about the resilience of the human spirit.

A Manual For Heartache by Cathy Rentzenbrink

Not published until the end of June, but absolutely worth pre-ordering is A Manual For Heartache. In her memoir, The Last Act Of Love, Cathy Rentzenbrink wrote about how her family was torn about by an accident that happened to her beloved brother Matty and left him in a permanent vegetative state. And in A Manual For Heartache, she writes with clarity and empathy about how to live with grief and loss but find space in your heart for hope too.

Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter

In this award-winning debut novel, two young boys reeling from the death of their mother, and their father, who is a Ted Hughes scholar, are visited by the Crow of Ted Hughes’s poem. Capricious yet kind, mischievous but magical, Crow helps put this broken family back together again in this elegant, blackly funny book.

The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe

Katie Roiphe looks at how five writers and thinkers (Susan Sontag, John Updike, Sigmund Freud, Marcus Sendak and Dylan Thomas) dealt with their impending deaths and, in turn, show the reader how to be less afraid in the face of the death.

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

There can’t be many Red readers who haven’t read Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, but it is a great reminder to those of us bowed down by our troubles that this too will pass. Sometimes redemption can come simply from putting one foot in front of the other and heading out into the world again.

In the space of a few months, iconic writer Joan Didion endured the trauma of her daughter being put on life support for septic shock, then her husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a sudden and fatal coronary. Her daughter, seemingly recovered, then collapsed and went through six hours of brain surgery. So, The Year Of Magical Thinking isn’t a self-help book or inspiration guide on how to heal. Rather, it’s a raw and painful account of Didion’s own personal holocaust and her belief that grief is a necessary and very individual process and that there is no right or wrong way to grieve nor schedule to stick to.

Insert your own comfort read here

While these books, both fiction and non-fiction, deal specifically with bereavement or loss, I want to add that sometimes when you’re elbow deep in grief, these are the last books that you want to read. When my mother died, all I could read were Mills & Boons and I devoured Regency romance novels as I sat at the bedside of my terminally ill father. I wanted to read something safe and formulaic with a happy ever after guaranteed. When I put a callout on Twitter, other people who’d lost loved ones said that fantasy, paranormal, thrillers and chick lit novels had all provided them with a much needed escape or distraction. So, for those of you going through hard times, I hope you find solace in the pages of whatever you choose to read.

For younger readers

The Sad Book by Michael Rosen

Written after the death of Michael Rosen’s nineteen year old son, Eddie, from meningitis, this picture book (with beautiful illustrations from Quentin Blake) explains to young children how sadness and all the other complicated feelings that come from bereavement are a necessary and unavoidable part of life. Not just for tinies; this book makes sense of the senseless for all ages.

The Paper Dolls by Julia Donaldson

Ostensibly about a string of paper dolls who go on adventures until a pair of scissors cuts them down in their prime, The Paper Dolls is a great starting point for a discussion about grief with children as young as three. Be warned, every parent I know who’s read this book with their kids has ended up a weepy mess.

For teens

When A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

When A Monster Calls is inspired by an idea from the late writer Siobhan Dowd and is a dark fairy tale about a boy called Conor with a mother who is terminally ill, who’s visited one night by a ‘monster.’ With illustrations that bring Patrick Ness’s powerful story to life, older children and teenagers will find the rage and raw pain of When A Monster Calls resonates with them, as will its message of survival.

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